Posts in "Education"

October 30, 2014

Ebola is an issue in the North Carolina Senate race. (Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call File Photo)

Millions of social conversations between North Carolina voters, candidates and big money special interest groups on Twitter provide compelling clues as to why Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan maintains a sliver of a lead over her Republican opponent, state Speaker Thom Tillis.

It may be surprising to learn that just 20 people were able to reach more than 23 million people in four weeks of Twitter conversations by directly engaging 5,936 North Carolinians who, in turn, amplified those tweets with viral precision to their friends, their friends’ friends and far beyond.

How will that viral influence impact the outcome on Tuesday? Verifeed pointed our social search and pattern recognition algorithms at understanding what issues were resonating with voters, who influences and amplifies sentiment, and how opinions change over time.

November 20, 2013

OK. So Education Secretary Arne Duncan could have said it better, but fundamentally he was right: Parents are getting awakened to how inferior even “good” American schools are, and they don’t like it.

Speaking to state school superintendents in Richmond last week, Duncan said that some opposition to adoption of the Common Core education standards is coming from “white suburban moms who — all of a sudden — [find] their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were …”

His comments lit a firestorm of criticism on Twitter and the blogosphere, with critics accusing him of sexism and racism, and he had to publicly admit “clumsy phrasing.”

If he was clumsy, it was in knocking the kids. On the rest of what he said, he was dead right. Full story

September 6, 2013

Even though the unemployment rate dropped 0.1 percent in August, the job growth number — 169,000 — was anemic. So many people have given up looking for work that the true unemployment rate is 17.7 percent. The economy is still 1.9 million jobs short of its peak before the 2008 recession. This has been the slowest job-market recovery since World War II.

So, who’s to blame and what’s to be done?

In a provocative Wednesday column in The Wall Street Journal, editorial writer Stephen Moore points out that the groups losing the most during the so-called recovery — young voters, single women, blacks, Hispanics and people with a high school or less education — are the very groups that voted most strongly for Barack Obama in 2012. Full story

May 15, 2013

As I alluded to in the previous post on the Education Innovation Summit in Scottsdale, Ariz., a number of digital technology programs today give kids and teachers a leg up on learning. They can provide instant feedback on what pupils are learning, customize content to a student’s achievement level, teach English as a second language in novel ways and help kids keep up with assignments.

Coursera, the university-based distant-learning system, has just announced it’s going to help K-12 schools, too.

There were hundreds of new digital ideas on display at the summit. Also, charter-school operators offering competition to public school systems — which can make them better if they will rise to meet the challenge. There’s even now a New Schools Venture Fund providing money for startup charters in poverty areas.

May 8, 2013

In the 30th anniversary year of the landmark report on U.S. education failure, “A Nation at Risk,” I really think there’s hope — at long, long last — for a turnaround.

The hope lies in digital learning, in new schools that challenge the old kind and in the adoption by 45 states of a “core curriculum” whereby kids across the country will be taught what they need to succeed in the 21st century. Full story